The True Cost of a Security Breach in 2024: $677 Million

In 2023, ExtraHop released the first edition of its True Cost of a Security Breach report. The report took an unprecedented look at the long-term financial impact of six different data breaches.

ExtraHop analysts combed through hundreds of pages of SEC filings, conducted stock research, and poured over open-source intelligence to gain an accurate picture of the end-to-end costs associated with several high-profile data breaches across six industries.

We suspected that conventional research on the cost of a data breach vastly underestimated the true cost, doing a grave disservice to security practitioners, risk managers, insurance actuaries, corporate boards, and global regulators trying to make informed decisions about how to mitigate this pressing risk.

Our diligent quantitative research confirmed this hypothesis. Where conventional research in 2023 indicated that the average cost of a data breach hovered around $9 million, our analysis turned up evidence of breaches where the long-term costs averaged $531 million.

This year’s report brings new data on the cost of three breaches that occurred in 2023 and 2024. The estimated total cost of one of those breaches is expected to exceed $2.8 billion, pushing the average cost of a breach to $677 million. To put a finer point on it, that’s over a half billion dollars.

The 2024 edition of the report also demonstrates that even “small” breaches (relatively speaking) can have an outsize financial impact on an organization. In one breach ExtraHop analyzed, threat actors accessed a tiny number of user accounts (less than one-tenth of one percent of all user accounts at this organization), yet the breach has ended up costing the company $39 million to date. It also erased millions of dollars in value for investors and pushed the company’s stock to the edge of delisting.

We share this information not to incite fear, but to arm security, risk, and regulatory decision-makers with accurate, quantifiable data about the financial risk associated with a security breach.

The True Cost of a Security Breach report from ExtraHop has been one of our most popular downloads, suggesting that security and risk leaders are hungry for realistic data about the end-to-end financial impact of a breach that can help them better assess their organization’s risk profile.

Explore the 2024 edition of the report.